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Recent Broadcasts
- Ars PoeticaApril 22, 2025 at 10:00 AMView playlist
Ichiko Aoba
- Ars PoeticaApril 1, 2025 at 10:00 AMView playlist
poetry hiatus
- Ars PoeticaMarch 12, 2025 at 9:00 AMView playlist
Billy Collins dancing toward Bethlehem
If there is only enough time in the final
minutes of the twentieth century for one last dance I would like to be dancing it slowly with you,
say, in the ballroom of a seaside hotel. My palm would press into the small of your back as the past hundred years collapsed into a pile of mirrors or buttons or frivolous shoes,
just as the floor of the nineteenth century gave way and disappeared in a red cloud of brick dust. There will be no time to order another drink or worry about what was never said,
not with the orchestra sliding into the sea and all our attention devoted to humming whatever it was they were playing.
- Ars PoeticaMarch 5, 2025 at 9:00 AMView playlist
Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
- Ars PoeticaFebruary 26, 2025 at 9:00 AMView playlist
Songs about babies and poems about parents
-----
Untitled Victor Hugo
From her earliest years, this was her thing To come into my room a while each morning. I’d wait, as for a sunbeam to appear. She’d march in, say ‘Good morning, little father’, Sit down on my bed, take up my pen, Open my books, muddle my papers, laughing, Then like a bird of passage she’d be gone And I, with clearer head, begin again My interrupted work, often to find Some zany arabesque she’d left behind Among my manuscripts, a sketch she’d traced, And then, blank pages that her hands had creased. Somehow, my best lines fell between those folds. She loved God, flowers, starry skies, green fields. Before she was a woman, she was spirit And from her clear eyes her bright soul shone out. She quizzed me constantly, upon all things. Ah, but the warm glow of those winter evenings When we’d talk language, grammar, history, Their mother near, four children at my knee, A few friends by the hearth and much to say – That was a life to which content came easy. And now to think that she is dead! God help me, For I, when she was sad, was never happy. I took no joy in joyous balls and parties If parting I’d seen shadow in her eyes.
- Ars PoeticaFebruary 12, 2025 at 9:00 AMView playlist
Two e.e. cummings love poems and one by dorothea goodman
[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] - e.e. cummings
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
---
[since feeling is first] - e.e. cummings
since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world
my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry —the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
---
The Two Times I Loved You the Most in a Car - Dorothea Grossman
It was your idea
to park and watch the elephants
swaying among the trees
like royalty
at that make-believe safari
near Laguna.
I didn’t know anything that big
could be so quiet.
And once, you stopped
on a dark desert road
to show me the stars
climbing over each other
riotously
like insects
like an orchestra
thrashing its way
through time itself
I never saw light that way
again.
- Ars PoeticaJanuary 29, 2025 at 9:00 AMView playlist
Frank O'Hara
I watched an armory combing its bronze bricks
and in the sky there were glistening rails of milk.
Where had the swan gone, the one with the lame back?
Now mounting the steps
I enter my new home full
of grey radiators and glass
ashtrays full of wool.
Against the winter I must get a samovar
embroidered with basil leaves and Ukrainian mottos
to the distant sound of wings, painfully anti-wind,
a little bit of the blue
summer air will come back
as the steam chuckles in
the monsters steamy attack
and I’ll be happy here and happy there, full
of tea and tears. I dont suppose I’ll ever get
to Italy, but I have the terrible tundra at least.
My new home will be full
of wood, roots and the like,
while I pace in a turtleneck
sweater, repairing my bike.
I watched the palisades shivering in the snow
of my face, which has grown
preternaturally pure.
Once I destroyed a man’s idea of himself to have him.
If I’d had a samovar then
I’d have made him tea
and as hyacinths grow from
a pot he would love me
and my charming room of tea cosies full of dirt
which is why I must travel, to collect the leaves.
O my enormous piano, you are not like being outdoors
though it is cold and you
are made of fire and wood!
I lift your lid and the mountains
return, that I am good.
The stars blink like a hairnet that was dropped.
on a seat and now it is lying in the alley behind
the theater where my play is echoed by dying voices.
I am really a woodcarver
and my words are love
which willfully parades in
it’s room, refusing to move.
- Ars PoeticaJanuary 22, 2025 at 9:00 AMView playlist
Bob dylan and Joan Baez